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Good luck finding quant work. In today's market place, most quants are PHD's in the hardcore sciences such as Physics or Math. Also, quants are located in the tri-state area. If you do have interest in becoming a quant, computer science as an undergrad then financial engineering can also be a good path but finance and/or accounting is probably not going to cut it and I am speaking from experience in this area.

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yea, if i could program i'd be a quant by now lol.

you need academic quality modelling skills in addition to computer science graduate level programming skills.

you need to be able to take a model from theory to practice, backtest it, evaluate it, and make it run by itself.

furhter, as mentioned, quants are typically in tristate area and a majority of the time refer to PhD in math, finance, physics, engineering + computer skills.

DE shaw and many others though hire undergraduate-graduate level quant analysts.

not an easy thing to break into. if i had a "do-over" it'd be to be a sick computer programmer.

Barron

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um, no. while DE shaw and some others may specifically want math/comp sci kids with no finance background, many quant shops are perfectly happy to have an econ or finance undergrad, as long as they have a modicum of programming ability. believe it or not, quants need to have economic intuition and a knowledge of financial instruments, not just the ability to work with c++ and stochastic calculus. it really doesn't take that much programming skill to backtest a model, but you have to be smart enough and have the intuition to come up with reasonable things to test and interpret the results once you do.

that being said, the above is really geared towards the hedge fund world .. I'd imagine sell-side shops have more PhD's and more pure math guys.

sincerely,
just out of undergrad and working at a quant fund.

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i didn't think i was implying that any programmer could do it.

you clearly have to have a finance background/economic fundamentals. for me that wouldn't be the issue. there were also maths tests i had to take. that wouldnt' be the issue either...the C++/Java programming test would be.

i searched job boards, personal contacts, recruiters etc. for analytics/quant etc. positions and i'd say a huge chunk of them require at least my schooling (MBA mathematical finance, 1 year financial analysis training) and programming.

the ones that don't require the schooling do absolutely require the programming and somem fin/econ background.

i've spoken with many people and they all seem to say the same thing: "we can train a good logical thinker with some fin/econ background in econ better than we can train a great financial economic mind to program"

so like i said, i wish i had that do-over lol.

btw, what is "a modicum" or programming ability. i can program in matlab to test and develop, but can't bring the model live so to speak (i.e. pull data from somewhere and put it somewhere else)

Barron